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In mature organizations, behind every tactical initiative lies a strategic objective. Whether you’re looking to restructure your knowledge base, integrate systems or completely change the processes surrounding request management, such endeavors (should) exist to support the greater needs of your business and its customers.
Yet all too often teams and individuals struggle to connect those dots for a myriad of reasons. Poor communication, visibility and data interpretation leave teams in a state of cruise control, simply maintaining a sinking ship.Fortunately, clearly defining your strategy can help. In the world of service management, I find that IT and business leaders alike are typically looking for initiatives that will help further one of five strategic objectives:

1) INCREASING BUSINESS SERVICE TRANSPARENCY AND PRIORITIZATION

It’s difficult to do anything without a strategy, and in order to develop a strategy, you must first have an accurate layout of where your business stands currently. Looking at service automation, in particular, decision makers need to have accurate, meaningful and real-time data that provides visibility into the ebbs and flows of services.

Obtaining this visibility is a key building block for any other service-related initiatives, as it will provide your team with the knowledge you need to prioritize new initiatives and bolster or eliminate anything you already have in place based on current performance.

2) BRINGING VALUED METRICS TO THE BUSINESS

Another common challenge many leaders with whom I speak face is making meaningful data available to the appropriate parties in order to drive more informed decision making. The key to overcoming this challenge is to remove the silos that tend to exist around data and exposing this information to all areas of the business, not just IT.

By fulfilling this objective, you can ultimately provide a better internal customer experience. That’s because arming business leaders with the right metrics can help you to help them deliverhigherquality service, strengthen communications with their customers, provide better ongoing engagement and increase transparency.

3) ELIMINATING WASTED TIME OF VALUABLE RESOURCES

What happens when valuable resources waste time duplicating efforts or following redundant processes? The results aren’t pretty. And it’s no surprise that organizations see significant increases in value when these resources are able to focus on activities that drive core business KPIs instead.

Automation helps here by saving money and time when it comes to handling previously manual and/or redundant tasks, such as incidents, problems and changes in IT. Service management spreads these benefits even wider by applying automation to departments outside of IT.

4) SLA ACCOUNTABILITY

We have SLAs for a reason, but they’re only as good as your team’s accountability. And unfortunately, holding departments and partners accountable for meeting expected SLAs eludes many organizations today.

Once again, automating processes can help make service delivery more consistent and improve reporting capabilities. Taken together, these factors make it easier to meet SLAs and monitor key metrics to confirm accountability.

5) TRANSFORMING IT

Finally, a huge initiative among organizations today is transforming IT from a cost center to a consultative body for the entire business. It’s the age of disruption, and we’ve realized that IT is in the best position to provide us with the innovative technology we need to truly make a splash in the market.

And transforming IT extends beyond equipping the business with the tools it needs to be disruptive. It also applies to creating an innovative, yet secure experience for internal customers, which is critically important since balancing the user experience and potential risks isn’t always easy, but it is necessary.

DEFINE YOUR STRATEGIC OBJECTIVES EARLY ON

Identifying which strategic objectives apply to your organization early on will provide a solid foundation for any service management initiative. Doing so will help define your service management roadmap by giving you a better understanding of which areas of the business need service management the most, what your key goals should be and what processes or technology you may already have in place to kickstart these activities.

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